ABSTRACT

This chapter deals with the Daly's influential armchair explorations of distant Africa in the nineteenth century. It revolves around an issue largely ignored or simply off the map of most histories of American geography the role of geographical knowledge and practice complicit with colonization of Central Africa's Congo region. While many scholars have examined representations of Africa in popular nineteenth-century American geographical media such as textbooks, maps, and magazines; and/or have studied the relative insignificance, especially of Central Africa, to American consumers of geography until the early twentieth century. The chapter outlines a diplomatic and business relationship between the American Geographical and Statistical Society (AGS) and Central African exploration, colonization, and development decades earlier. Daly's contribution to Leopold's enterprise was much more in establishing the commercial potential of the Congo River basin in the imaginations of his many geographical and business audiences. From 1879-1884 Leopold hired Stanley to help build his colony along the Congo, with H. S. Sanford as go-between.